Conversations about Psychology and Sexual Orientation

Chapter 3: The Best of Both Worlds: Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Clinical Practice

Chapter 3 The Best of Both Worlds Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Clinical Practice Douglas C. Haldeman My godson, who is a thirteen-year-old soccer superstar, recently dyed his hair platinum blonde. Good as it looks, it caused me to wonder aloud to his mother, who is a developmental psychologist, how we know when adolescence is over. She replied,“When we’ve separated ourselves enough that we feel safe going back into the stew.” Not unlike where we are developmentally in LGB psychology, actually. And though the debate about cultural assimilation has been going for some time now, it has only recently come to the clinical practice of psychology. How secure are we with the cohesiveness of LGB psychology and its contribution to LGB society as a whole? Are we ready to break the mold of tradition in conceptualizing clinical practice, or at least move out of the box? The discussion of how to conceptualize clinical practice with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients is in a transition that parallels our evolving understanding of sexual orientation itself. As such, it is an opportune time to examine long-held beliefs and to see where modification of these beliefs can bring clinical practice closer to the needs of an evolving LGB community. Historically, we have seen an essentialist position dominate our thinking with regard to the clinical implications of issues for LGB clients. This position may now be strengthened, and brought closer to the complex realities of sexual orientation, by integrating a social constructionist perspective. After all, if adolescence is indeed the “second autonomy ,” then we should be able to modify our structures without fearing a loss of cohesion. 57 Contributions of Essentialism Most clinicians familiar with the life experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients are acquainted with essentialist phenomenology as it relates to sexual orientation. I cannot count, in my own experience as a clinician, the number of times I have heard a client say, “From an early age, I just knew I was different,” when asked to describe the process of coming to awareness of sexual orientation. Similarly, asking a newly out LGB individual at midlife to assess her or his path around sexual orientation often elicits a remark such as “I just could not continue to live a lie,” as if the recent decision to come out necessarily invalidates all life choices around sociosexual relating that preceded it. Essentialism is the very cornerstone by which LGB people have defined and protected themselves. The dominant culture, the LGB subculture , and the mental health professions have all reinforced the notions that sexual orientation is an innate, integral aspect of identity, that it is fixed and immutable, and that the primary task of psychotherapy is to facilitate the individual’s uncovering of a repressed or denied essence. “I am what I am” has been the party line. Those who deviate from this way of understanding sexual orientation are either being dishonest with themselves or putting themselves at risk to be portrayed as mentally ill by the heterosupremacist fringes of religion and psychoanalysis, clinging to the pathology view of same-sex sexual orientation despite its having been long rejected by all mental health organizations. As a result, writings about sexual orientation from other than an essentialist perspective have been all but absent from the psychological literature (Stein, 1996). Given the present discussion, it is tempting to do a theoretical aboutface and embrace social constructionism as the path to a more complete, thoughtful understanding of the complexities associated with sexual orientation . But, before the bath water is discarded, along with the baby that was once our profession’s nascent understanding of sexual orientation, it might first be useful to examine the ways in which essentialism has served a variety of useful purposes. Organized psychology and psychiatry have been major contributors to the robust, enduring qualitites of the essentialist perspective on sexual orientation. Given that most of the historical literature on sexual orientation was written from a negative essentialist viewpoint, it became important for the organized mental health professions to develop policies that were consonant with the ever-growing database about the psychoso58 d o u g l a s c . h a l d e m a n cial aspects of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals’ normative life experiences . The findings of investigators studying any number of variables relative to life adjustment, personal sense of well-being, relationship competence, vocational abilities, and...